David Jones
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David Jones David Jones is best known for his highly acclaimed Magic knight series of games released on the budget label Mastertronic.
The first of these was Finders Keepers in 1985, which was a platform/maze exploration game, and garnered Mastertronic with one of their highest scoring games, but the next title Spellbound released at the end of the year was to get even greater acclaim, Crash magazine giving it a huge score of 95%. It was also one of the first releases on the Mastertronic M.A.D. label.
The game was controlled by a series of pull down windows, which allowed Magic Knight to interact with the game environment, using commands such as pick up, drop, talk and use, all while able to control the character's movements on screen.
Also present in the game are David's trademark gags and sense of humour. At one point Magic knight meets his end by just walking into a pitch black room for instance.
The follow up to Knight Tyme was the first game specifically written for the Spectrum 128K machine, although poor sales made the decision to cut the game down to a 48K version. Again the game was highly acclaimed, while playing very similarly to Spellbound, the totally different setting and larger game made for a totally different feeling experience.
The last Magic Knight game to date was Stormbringer, again available in 128K and 48K versions. By this time in 1986 though Mastertronic had gone through some major changes, and David admits his heart was not really in this one, despite still getting high scores from the magazines of the day, it was not the success of it's prequels.
David wrote the code on a TRS-80 Model III, and then with his own cable
dumped the code into a ZX Spectrum, this machine has been donated to the
Museum, along with his holdings of disks.
David was paid 10p for every copy sold, which went up to 12.5p for the
M.A.D. titles, which may not sound much today, but at the time and with
the games selling upwards of 300,000 copies it was quite a nice bit of
money.
David was to complete his Bsc with honours in information technology in 1991
After Mastertronic and furthering his education, David was to work on many different projects, including ones for companies Psygnosis and Acclaim working on such games as G-police for the Playstation.
Realising he didn't really need to work anymore, and dissillusioned in having to work on projects he did not believe in, with people who could not write them themselves he left the industry for many years.
Returning to the games, David worked with Freestyle games, on the DJ Hero titles.
He is now a Games Lecturer at the Breda University in the Netherlands.
https://www.facebook.com/MagicKnightGames/
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Publication articles relating to David Jones :
| Item | Publication | Date |
| Colourful location - utility to help you poke colour on the QL screen [Type-In Listing] | Popular Computing Weekly Vol 4 No 25 - 20-26 June 1985 | 20th June 1985 |
| David Jones [Interview] | Arcade Magazine Issue #22 (August 2000) | 2000 |
